Monthly Archives: January 2015

“So a little over a year ago, Kroll, the expensive-suit-wearing, cigarette-smoking international detectives — the Elves — merged with O’Gara, the down-and-dirty, cigar-chomping armored-car manufacturers — the Dwarves — and for something like a year, the board of directors has been completely blocked, or at least this is what Phil told me.”

“Was Phil supposed to tell you?”

“Sure,” I said with a shrug, then, “Probably not.”

“Why did he tell you?”

“I don’t know. But the elves and the dwarves, they couldn’t agree on the direction of the company, after buying a bunch of little security companies — we do drug testing, background checks—”

“Anti-terrorist driving-technique training,” Jim reminded me.

“It’s one of my greatest disappointments that I haven’t gotten to take the first course yet. So after buying this first wave of companies, the board made up of elves and dwarves was unable to agree on what to do next.”

“Of course.”

“Of course. I mean, elves and dwarves. So growth has ground to a halt, the larger business had kinda ground to a halt. We’re bringing in some money — we did the outside security audit on the first Palm device with a radio in it, so you can get data on the road —”

“I know about that. I want to get one.”

“Me, too. Can you imagine being anywhere and being able to send email, or pull up a webpage?”

“A really crappy webpage.”

“Granted. And we did some big job for 3Com or somebody. As part of some follow-on work, they’ve got people like Tom building a secure server for them.”

“Tom?”

“Cool guy. I’ll introduce you. Anyway, we’re making money—”

“You’re working with Arturo,” Jim reminded me.

“Of course,” I said, making a flourished salute. “Thank you, Yahoo.”

“I had nothing to do with it,” he said. “Different part of Yahoo than I’m in.”

“But we’re doing a lot of work for you guys.” Though I wondered if Jim was tracking Yahoo’s plummeting stock price. “Anyway, it’s not enough. The scanning project I’m on is nowhere near taking off. We need more money to grow to the point where we can make the kind of money we think there is to be made.”

“You came out here to work for a detective agency, and it’s turning into a .com startup.”

“How did you know that?”

He shrugged. “Taher was at Netscape, he has a reputation. And taking on a round of big tech-company funding is how you get the money to do what you’re talking about.”

“Jesus. You make it sound so matter-of-fact.”

“Happens every day.”

“Well, it might happen to us. In addition to the elves/dwarves thing, there was a big, ah, financial misrepresentation by one of the sides, which has led to a sudden desire on everyone’s parts to simply be done with the thing. But they don’t have enough resources to simply break the thing up into its little component pieces.”

“So they’re talking with a big fund that breaks up companies.”

“This really happens all the time?”

“It happens.”

“But they don’t want to sell us. I think Kroll itself will remain independent, but everything else will be harvested or whatever, except us. They’re launching us as a startup, or they’re trying to. Starting in a couple of weeks, I’m going to be running three or more interviews a day, for maybe the next two months.”

Jim laughed. “Sounds like fun.”

“Oh, it will be. We may need to hire a lot of people, fast, if this thing with the Breakup guys goes through.” I thought for a moment. “If this goes through, my life is probably going to be a lot different.”

“You’re just now realizing that?”

“I’m just now realizing that. I only found out today.”

“That’s okay then. But, one thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Why the hell were they bugging you?”

“Oh! The Breakup guys are out here, but the main spy guys in the agency are in New York, mostly. So they were afraid we might take a meeting with the Breakup guys and make some kind of deal behind their back.”

“Okay, that is paranoid.”

“At the end of the day, man, don’t mess with Elves. They will fuck you up.”

“Welcome back,” I said to Tom. He’d been out at our Hong Kong office with a bunch of Brits and other ex-pat security consultants. “How was it?”

“Quite nice,” he said with gravelly sincerity. “Big work for big customers, drinking most every evening then back on the case by morning. Man, the Kroll people out there really can put it away — all night and three times a day as well. Not sure how they stay alive, eating so little.”

“You feeling okay?”

“Bit of the old jet lag, but actually, if you must know I’m slightly pissed off. My bloody boss backed away from his promise to let me buy a right fancy spectrometer. Before I left, not two weeks back, he said I could get one, now he won’t even bloody talk about it. Not like we don’t have money coming in — I helped see to that in Hong Kong.” He shot a coy glance. “Know what you can do with a proper spectrometer?”

“No, what?”

“If you spend about ten grand and know how to use it, you can sweep for bugs.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Evidently it’s huge here in Silicon Valley,” Tom said. “Taher once told me that while he was at Netscape, they used to sweep for bugs once a month and they’d regularly find at least one — from Microsoft, they presumed, though sometimes there’d be several different makes, from different sources. They’d pull them out once a month, usually from the boardroom, right before a board meeting, only to find more next month.”

“Jeez,” I said. “I wonder if the spies showing up to collect the tapes ever bumped into each other.”

“That’s not how it’s done, mate. The recorders are somewhere else, the bugs just radio off to some other location. That’s how you can spot them with a radio spectrometer. Heavy, unexpected source of radio waves in a lamp, or an electrical socket? It’s probably a little packet of evil kit.”

“That’s messed up.”

“That’s business. Anyway, it seemed like a decent service to be able to offer. Maybe even try it out here in the office.”

I blanched.

“What?” he asked. Then he laughed. “Oh, you are a right paranoid bastard.”

“Those people have some bent logic on their side, but they’re sure it makes sense.”

He looked at me for a moment. “Anything happen while I was out?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“That’s a little strange, but only a little. He smiled, shaking his head slowly. Now you’ve got me going.”

“Sorry, man.”

He shrugged. “Well, I’ll leave you to your psychosis. I have a secure server to build for a client.”

Later that day, I caught Phil.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

He turned away from his laptop and faced me straight on, palms flat on his desktop. “Had a buddy in town. Old SAS mate. He got drunk, completely smashed, and tore off away from us, me and these two girls, and we were like, ‘Wait!’ Because he only just landed, he didn’t know his way around. I got to some Palo Alto cops and I told them the story, who he was and who I was and how to bring him home when they found him, and they did, they found him not forty-five minutes later, hiding behind a redwood tree over by Stanford. They shined a light over at him and said, ‘Sir, please step away out from behind the tree.’ And he said, ‘Okay, okay officer.’ And they said, ‘Do you know where you are?’ And he said, ‘No, you got me, I don’t,’ and they said, ‘Is your name,’ and then they said his name, and he said, ‘Yeah!’ And they said, ‘Did you just arrive here in the States a few hours ago?’ And his eyes got huge and he said, ‘Yeah!’ And they said, ‘Are you staying with a man named Phil, at,’ and then they said my address, and he stumbled toward them near tears and said, ‘You American cops are top notch! You know everything!’ So they took him home and that was that, all sorted.”

“That is crazy,” I said.

“It is. He had no idea how they knew all that shit.”

“Talked to Tom.”

“Tom’s back? Oh, of course he is.”

“His boss won’t let him buy a radio spectrometer. First he would, now he wouldn’t.”

Phil nodded. “The whole place is bugged now,” he said.

“This place.”

“Here. Some of it. Not right here, probably. Doesn’t matter, though — they can’t afford the staff to check anything the bugs might be picking up in any case.”

“Who?” I asked

“Kroll,” he said. “The main office, the detectives.”

“Why?”

And he told me. It all made sense, in a terrible sort of way. If it hadn’t, I’m not sure what I would have done.

During one of Jim’s short stays back in California between extended trips away — he wanted to use all his vacation time before leaving Yahoo to work full-time on his startup, Mojo Nation — there was time to get back to our preferred rib place, only to be confronted with a terrible reality. They were closing.

“They raise my rent,” said the restaurant’s proprietor, a massive, middle-aged Caribbean man. He was maybe a head taller and more than twice as wide as I was from any angle. We’d become “hey”-level friends after Jim and I had eaten enough ribs there that we didn’t strictly speaking need to order after sitting down — and it wasn’t because we stood out as the only two gringo dudes in the place, but because we were some of the only-ever dudes in the place. Once, I saw diners at as many as four other tables while we were there. Usually, the place was empty, or nearly so. This in itself should’ve been strange, just blocks from Stanford University and high-class downtown Palo Alto. Why was there never anyone else there? Never mind: we’ll have the ribs again, please.

“That sucks,” Jim said.

The big man gripped his heart and lowered his head, grimacing as if speared. “Closing party, end of the month,” he said. “Fifty dollars gets you in that night, and anything, everything. All the drink —” He waved his hand over the bar, and it was finely stocked. “—whatever you want.”

Jim knew what he wanted. “Aw, I can’t make it,” he said. “I’ll be out of town.” Africa, I think it was, actually, on safari with his father. “Can I get some of those ribs?”

The guy paused for a moment. “It will be a buffet, for all the food we have left. Will be much, but no ribs.”

Jim pulled out his wallet. “What if I paid you now for two orders of ribs? Could you wrap them up for me that night?” He pointed at me. “He can pick it up.”

The guy was a big man, like I said, but not so big as to avoid taking Jim’s money. I had enough love for the place that sure, I’d be there for its final night.

There’d been a lot of sketchy people working there, a revolving door of folk who didn’t seem interested in eye contact and who I may have never seen again, but there had been this one waiter who’d seemed like a decent guy, the kind of person who looked back at you honestly when you looked at him. I thought of him as the cool dude.

As I walked in the door that early Saturday evening for the rib-joint’s final party, with a friend who’d probably prefer to remain nameless, I immediately took it as a bad sign when the cool dude held the door open for me but wouldn’t look at me. Okay, I thought, maybe he’s preoccupied. He’s basically losing his job with no notice. It’s his last day of work, and it’s a party where everyone’s paid $50 a head to consume as much of what remains of the place before the doors close forever. He might not expect to rake in the tips. So I figured maybe that would explain it.

There were a surprisingly large number of people there. About two-thirds were white couples in their 60s, oddly, with a couple of black guys flanked by outrageously over-proportioned blondes and a small crowd of somber, younger Hispanic guys, with the occasional young woman darting in and around between them.

Huh, I thought. My friend had never been there before, so he didn’t sense anything out of sorts. Then one of the older guys approached our table, gripping a larger, old-style camera with a massive flash mounted on top.

“Do you mind,” he asked us, “if you, ah, end up showing up in the background of some of the pictures from tonight?”

My friend and I looked at each other.

“No,” we said. He smiled, mopping his brow, breathing more quickly, and walked off. An older woman at the table to which he retreated saluted us with a shaky thumbs-up.

“You have to admit that was weird,” I said.

“I’ll gladly admit it. When is the food coming out?”

“In just a bit, I’d guess. The kitchen looks busy as hell.”

“Will someone come by to take our drink order or what?”

I looked around. Cool dude was working the bar.

“I’ll be right back,” I said, and moseyed on over.

He smiled thinly as I approached.
“What are you having?” he asked, lips pursed.

“I don’t know. What do you recommend?”

“I make something,” he said, turning away, rustling through a three-deep shelf of half-empty bottles. Over his shoulder, without looking at me, he asked, “Are you planning on staying…for the whole night?”

“Sure,” I said, and it echoed in my head like the voice of the naive farm boy in the horror movie who doesn’t know what he’s getting into. “And you?” I asked, trying to shake the feeling.

He shook his head, cheeks creasing with a forced smile. “Oh, no, no, no,” he said. “I’m here for an hour, then that’s all.” He held up the drink he’d poured into a plastic, 64-ounce cup. “I’m gone.”

I stared at the drink. “Would you mind making another one? For my friend?”

He nodded, and much more quickly poured equal amounts of Coke and rum together into another equally large cup.

“Good luck,” he said, and turned to the next person approaching the bar. I left him a giant tip, and time seemed to slow as I walked back to the table. I rewound the conversation in my head as I walked.

“I don’t know, man. What about that camera guy? Wasn’t that a little strange?”

“He’s an old dude, dude. They act weird.”

Some food came out. They gave us little paper plates just big enough to fit in our palms, which we greedily piled with shredded chicken and fried plantains and grilled carrots. The lights dimmed. The Caribbean music grew louder. A lot more people must have shown up when I wasn’t looking.

Then another guy from the same table as camera guy came over to us.

“I haven’t seen you boys around here before,” he said, raising his voice over the music.

“I’ve been here a bunch,” I said quickly. “Made a few friends.” I waved at the massive proprietor, who’d taken up a position near the front door to welcome new arrivals. He wasn’t receiving anyone at the moment, so he waved back, a smile nearly as wide as my actual head.

I avoided looking at my friend directly, but all the energy seemed to go out of his posture.

“Sure!” I said. “Sure, why not?”

The old guy laughed. “Why not?” he repeated back to me, striking a dance pose before shuffling off across the room. Three people back at his table waved at us, thumbs up.

“Okay,” my friend said, face down low against the table. “I did not like that.”

“There’s something going on here.”

“Oh, you think? You think? What the fuck, man?” He picked at a plantain. “They haven’t even brought out the good stuff, yet.” He took a sip of his drink and nearly spat it out. “What is this?”

“I think it’s all the rum they can’t sell after tonight.”

“Jesus Christ! Someone actually made this drink for you?” He leaned over to peer into my cup. “Did you really already drink half of that shit? Who made that?”

“The guy who also asked if were were staying for the whole night. Besides, my drink didn’t have nearly as much booze as yours.”

“Really?” he asked.

I glanced around. It had gotten dark in there while we were talking. A crushing paranoia descended upon me which in retrospect I’ll call the distant scream of good sense.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

My friend stood. “I gotta go to the bathroom,” he said.

“Cool.” I slapped my forehead. “Shit! Shit. Jim’s ribs.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Bathroom’s that way. I’ll see you over there.”

We split up. Walking over to the kitchen was like swimming through syrup. This was not the effect of alcohol. What the hell?

The guys in the kitchen did not speak English. I got it into my head that I could speak Spanish, and they didn’t understand that, either. I’d have to appeal to higher powers.

Massive man was still standing by the front door, though now he seemed to be greeting people who were leaving, not arriving. I was confused. He had his back to me, so I moved to tap him on his fat shoulder when suddenly a young, dark-haired woman, her face the portrait of fear, leapt in my way to wave me off. Then she stuck a smile to her face and spun around, facing the increasingly long line of dudes who were exit-greeting massive man. She discretely waved me over to one side, holding up a finger in the universal symbol of “please hang on” while helping attend the dudes. One by one they stepped forward to greet massive man, strongly shaking his massive hand. From my vantage point, I could see the swollen rolls of twenties and hundreds that each young Hispanic guy in turn pressing into his palm with each handshake, quickly passed off to the young lady, which she in turn was stuffing in a paper bag just as smoothly as she could.

Once the ritual line emptied out, she went up on her tip-toes and tapped him on the shoulder, pointing him over at me. For a moment, a frightened look passed across his face.

“My friend had paid for some ribs,” I said, pointing at the kitchen, “but the guys back there—“

He swept in, gripping me in a fierce hug. “You like-a my ribs!” he shouted, clapping me repeatedly on the back, pointing over to the kitchen and yelling something that was not exactly Spanish but which threw the cooks into a commotion. He slapped me once more on the back and like a partially tranquilized elephant turned away, lumbering back into the restaurant. I never saw him again.

The cooks passed over a pair of to-go containers, nodding fearfully, smiling hesitantly.

“Dude,” said my friend, returning from the bathroom. “I was wondering if maybe we should give it another—“

“Drug front,” I muttered, like a cough. “We’re gone.”

“What?!” he said, following me out the back door of the place. It was dark out, with rain coming down surprisingly hard. We bolted toward my car; I tossed him the keys — “You drive!” — and in minutes we were back at my apartment wondering what the hell had happened.

I don’t remember what time it was when it occurred to me that I should do something with the two boxes of ribs. My friend had only stayed for a little while before heading home — I think he only partly believed what I’d said I witnessed while he was in the bathroom — and the same album was playing that I’d put on when we’d come in. To be fair, though, it was the same music I’d been playing when we’d left originally, so it could just as easily have been on repeat.

Ah, crap: and, of course, there were the cats. Jim had been gone two days already, and I hadn’t stopped by to check on his cats. For whatever reason, it felt important to do it right then, slipping the ribs into Jim’s freezer at the same time. I still had no idea what had been in that drink — I wasn’t much of a drinker, but it didn’t feel much like the effects of alcohol — but I felt fine to drive. I probably wasn’t. I was probably doing something stupid. Jim didn’t live more than a quarter mile away, accessible through small suburban roads, so it felt low risk if my perception of my driving skill turned out to be skewed.

Jim lived on Rich Street, humorously enough. For a Silicon Valley multi-millionaire, he’d kept his humble digs: a one-bedroom rental in a two-story complex that probably hadn’t seen much maintenance since the late 1980s. That was the weird thing about Silicon Valley at the turn of the Twenty-First Century. The fastest computers in the world? Check. The greatest storage density available to mankind? Check. Buildings less than ten years old? Hardly anywhere. The whole place seemed build in the mid-80s and left to fend for itself against an annual brushing of light rain. I reckoned it was smart because it probably made him less of a target, in any case.

I got there just fine, walking up to the back door through his apartment’s rear parking space. Unlocking and swinging the door open, though, my paranoia flared up again, like a black bird on my shoulder, cawing madly.

That’s when I realized I was looking into Jim’s small apartment, but I was also looking out at the night sky beyond. Across the living room from the back door, the front door was half open.

A backed out, closing the rear entry in front of me. Again, suffocating in what I thought at the time was my own paranoia but which now sounds a lot more like good common sense, my flight instinct was strong.

Naturally, I walked around to the front of the apartment to the open door. After all, I’d signed up to watch Jim’s apartment. This was my responsibility.

I pulled out my cell phone. “Yeah,” I said to no one. “Hello? Hey. Yeah. Me? Nothing. Stupid evening. Feeding your cats now.” With a soft toe press, I swung the door fully open before stepping inside.

“Uh, huh,” I said, scanning the apartment. It didn’t look like it had been ransacked though, meaning no disrespect to Jim, it could be hard to tell. When you’re the guy who picks up all the toys, it can be a hassle figuring out where to pile it all neatly. But I easily counted six things that I’d have taken if I were robbing the place. Maybe Jim had been in one of his usual hurries to the airport and didn’t swing the door fully shut? When did he use the front door, anyway?

I walked slowly toward the bedroom. My jaw began to jitter, teeth chattering.

“There’s this guy named Doug,” I said. “Oh, you know him. Yeah, well, he’s got a new girlfriend. Official photographer of some Indian cult guru. No, come on, I’m not kidding.” There was no one in his bedroom. The closets were closed. I wasn’t going to open them. If someone walked in on you robbing a place, and your first reaction was not to run out one of the two available exits when you had a chance but instead tucked yourself away in a closet packed tightly with startup t-shirts and tech toys, then you’re dedicated enough to get away with it.

I fed the cats. “Sure,” I said, “he seems happy. Of course that’s all that’s important. I agree, he certainly deserves to be happy after all the crap he’s been through.” I tucked the ribs in the freezer. “Oh, what’s that? You’re coming back tomorrow morning early? Ah, cool. So I’ll just lock up then.”

I drove back to my place, still holding the phone to my head.

“No, I can’t explain what happened at the rib joint. But I think we were the only people going there for the ribs. No wonder he loved having us. Cocaine, I’ll guess. And there had to be some sex angle. No, I’m not driving back over there.” I walked into my place, checking the clock. “I know it’s not even eleven. Sure, they’re probably still going at it. Yes, I know I’m just sitting here talking on the phone.” I pulled the phone away from my head. “And there’s not actually anyone on the phone, so I’m not sure who I’m arguing with. Yes, I know I sound like a paranoid delusional. You say that like it’s a new thing.”

I set the phone down on my dining room table and made sure the window blinds were shut tight. “Yes,” I said, “I know I’m still talking to the air. It’s because for weeks now, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that someone’s watching me, somewhere. And days like this do not help me, not at all.”

Wherever Jim was, he probably wasn’t paying attention to Yahoo’s stock price. For five days at the end of March, it had reached and then slightly exceeded it’s value at the time of early February’s denial of service attacks. It would never be that high ever again. After cresting 100, in three weeks it dropped to 57.

Still, that was the least frightening thing I heard all month. Only a few days later, I found out who was spying on me — on all of us — and why.

While the Packet Storm crew was wondering how to get one of their fathers out of jail without rolling over for the FBI, I was under a different kind of pressure.

It was raining — it had been raining for a while. They called it the rainy season, and I’d never lived through something like that before. In Texas, it rained for at most a couple of hours, then it stopped. Maybe it was enough rain to wash away cattle, but it was always enough to know you’d been rained on. Maybe it’d rain again tomorrow, maybe in a couple of days or weeks, but that was about all you could say in terms of predicting the weather outside of hot or cold. In the Bay Area, I’d been told, we’d get three or four or sometimes five months of light to moderate pitter-pattering, and things would always be wet and it’d always be gray outside until springtime and its wave of warmth with hardly a cloud in the sky for seven or eight or nine months.

But the gray and the damp and the indeterminate constant drizzle — while Jim’s many multi-week trips and Doug’s relative social distance left me without close friends — all started getting to me.

It was fear, mostly. I was afraid that after finally making it to Silicon Valley, I no longer had what it took to make computers sing. It actually made me laugh, I could hardly imagine a greater tragedy. I’d lost touch with my technical roots. I’d become afraid of the details, which is the one thing you absolutely cannot do as a technically minded person. I still had my curiosity, but the fear was stronger than any love I still had for the details.

It simply seemed as though no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make anything work. More to the point, I couldn’t seem to do any work. Harry, the Englishman we’d been courting for a job since September, had finally come to an agreement with Phil and would be moving out with his girlfriend by early summer. He was working on contract in the meantime, and unfortunately I was the thing standing between him and the work he needed to do. Lineman had helped me scope down my research efforts to the most meaningful set of network attacks, but beyond assembling a list of them I simply couldn’t find it within myself to do the analysis and the writing that I needed to do for each vulnerability. And even once I had the content for our security findings, I still had no idea how to tie them together into a meaningful report. Harry was meant to hammer out the report generation engine. He was waiting on me for the report specs. He’d been asking for them every day for two weeks.

“Just show the findings,” Phil told me.

“It’s not that simple,” I said. “We can’t just give people a blast of raw data and expect they can use it to secure their network.”

“So make it pretty. That’s what you do.”

But the report generator had to run on a server somewhere, which meant it couldn’t simply be made beautiful and emailed off to our customers. We needed a report template that could be opened and read and managed under the Linux operating system — which, even more so at the time, offered serious limitations when it came to attractive and flexible graphic design. This was a terrific impediment to making something attractive. It was even worse for me in terms of devising something useful.

More and more often, for seemingly no reason, my heart would race. I wasn’t doing anything, and it was panic-making. “I can’t even get a network interface up on my Linux box,” I told Phil. “It’s been a week.” It had actually been, like I just said, two.

I’d met him, yet another Englishman but this one cut from a decidedly different cloth, wild-haired and wide-eyed, smiling a lot but walking through the halls like he was definitely not fooling around.

“I’ll get Tom to come by,” Phil said. “He’ll sort you out.”

And early that afternoon, he did.

Tom was one of the security consultants, and therefore automatically one of the cool kids. Like most of us, he didn’t have a traditional story for how he got there. He’d started out getting trained up to do welding and jobs like that, at least that was the he’d had set for himself by the testing of the English school system. But a friend who knew he was very good with cars had shown him one day how computers were just really big cars with engines just ripe for the tinkering.

“It’s just a matter of knowing what the parts are,” he said, “and where they are. How to tighten down the bolts as you’re stepping away from it so it doesn’t explode all over you when you start it back up.”

He showed me where the source code for my operating system’s kernel was stored, how to load a new kernel module — like support for the network interface I couldn’t get to work — and how to recompile the changed kernel before restarting.

I had a hard time believing how simple it was. “You can change the system while it’s running? From inside the system?” Do that on a Mac, at the time, and it might have crashed and never come back up.

Tom typed the command to restart. “Piece of piss,” he said.

But getting past one hurtle did nothing for my problem. The worst part was knowing it. I knew full well what my problem was: I was being emotional. In the past, when computer things didn’t work, I’d lean into the problem, ask myself, “I wonder why?” Then I’d begin trying things. But by that point, instead of leaning in I was leaning back, crossing my arms and saying, “Why does this goddamn thing not work?” And the emotion I was feeling robbed me of the cognition I needed to solve the problem. It was super clear what was happening, I simply couldn’t control it.

Maybe it was the long, punishing rainy season, maybe it was the lack of close friends around, maybe it was my overall beaten-down state, but it was fertile ground for the return of my depression, out from which grew my old paranoia — not, it would soon turn out, without very good reason.